The Charge

"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible." -- Alfred
Hitchcock

Opening Statement

Fifteen (15!) of Alfred Hitchcock's movies, spanning a period of over 30
years, are collected together in one of the year's very best HD releases -- a
perfect entry point for those new to the director and a reward for his most
devoted fans.

Facts of the Case

Saboteur (1942)A factory worker (Robert Cummings, Beach
Party) is wrongly accused of starting a fire that kills his best friend and
must race to clear his name.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)Bored teenager Charlotte Newton (Teresa
Wright, Somewhere in Time) longs for more excitement in her life, and
gets some in the form of a visit from her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten, The
Third Man), a sophisticated ladies' man who Charlotte begins to suspect
might be up to no good.

Rope (1948)Two young men (John Dall and Farley Granger)
strangle a classmate just to prove they can get away with it, then throw a party
to celebrate and raise the stakes. One of their guests, Rupert (Jimmy Stewart,
It's a Wonderful Life), proves to be the boys' match.

Rear Window (1954)When photographer Jeff Jeffries (Jimmy
Stewart) is laid up in his apartment after breaking his leg, he takes up
"observing" (spying) on the neighbors -- and happens to see what he is
sure is a murder.

The Trouble with Harry (1955)When a body is found in a small
East Coast town, everyone begins to suspect they may have played a role in the
death.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)The remake of Hitchcock's own
1934 movie finds Dr. Ben McKenna (Jimmy Stewart) and his wife Josephine (Doris
Day, Pillow Talk) vacationing in Morocco and uncovering a plot to
assassinate a foreign statesman. The McKennas must attempt to stop the murder
before it's too late and recover their son, who is kidnapped by the
assassins.

Vertigo (1958)Scottie Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart) is a San
Francisco policeman who retires after being traumatized on the job and suffers
from a paralyzing fear of heights. When an old friend hires Scottie to follow a
woman, Madeline (Kim Novak, Picnic), who is behaving strangely, Scottie
slowly grows obsessed with her, and then tragedy strikes. Then Scottie meets and
obsesses over another woman, who looks a lot like Madeline, and things get
stranger from there.

North by Northwest (1959)Advertising executive Roger Thornhill
(Cary Grant, Charade) is hunted and chased across the country when he's
mistaken for a government agent.

Psycho (1960)When Marion Crane (Janet Leigh, Hello Down
There) steals money from her job and goes on the run, she makes a pit stop
at the Bates Motel, run by Norman (Anthony Perkins, Pretty Poison), a
nice guy with mother issues.

The Birds (1963)Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren, Citizen
Ruth) visits a small California town where there appears to be a
larger-than-usual population of birds, and they start behaving strangely.

Marnie (1964)Mark Rutland (Sean Connery, From Russia With
Love) marries Marnie (Tippi Hedren), a thief and compulsive liar, then tries
to cure her of those impulses by forcing her to revisit her past.

Torn Curtain (1966)A physics professor (Paul Newman, Cool
Hand Luke) and his assistant (Julie Andrews, The Sound of Music)
travel to East Germany to obtain defense secrets, then must make their way back
home with the German State Security in pursuit.

Topaz (1969)A French special agent (Frederick Stafford,
Werewolf Woman) is enlisted by his American friend to help expose a spy
ring that has been giving secrets to the Soviet Union.

Frenzy (1972)A down-on-his-luck writer (Jon Finch, The
Vampire Lovers) is wrongly accused of murder when a London serial killer
hits close to home.

Family Plot (1976)A pair of con artists (Barbara Harris,
Grosse Pointe Blank, and Bruce Dern, The Hole) are hired to find
the nephew of a millionaire heiress, but the pair crosses paths with a kidnapper
(William Devane, Rolling Thunder) and his girlfriend (Karen Black,
Nashville).

The Evidence

Oh, my. Where do we start?

Alfred Hitchcock is one of the greatest directors of all time. Period. It's
not a statement of opinion, it's a statement of fact. One could make a case that
he's the greatest director of all time. I would be willing to hear that
argument.

Universal's incredible Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection gathers
a whopping 15 of the director's movies together, many of which are appearing on
Blu-ray for the first time. These are not necessarily his 15 "best"
movies, partially because of rights issues (Warner Bros. holds the license for
several of his movies, though they did work with Universal to ensure that
North by Northwest be included here). That's OK, because what's collected
here provides a more interesting examination of Hitchcock as a filmmaker and at
the trajectory of his career. As someone who loves to look at films as the body
of work of a single author, The Masterpiece Collection is just as
worthwhile for its hits as well as its misses -- and, to be fair, the misses are
few. Even "miss" isn't really a fair classification, and one that's
only being used because those movies are being held up against all-time great
movies like Psycho and Vertigo. Not every movie can be
Vertigo.

One of my roadblocks with Hitchcock has always been my own aversion to one
of his favorite plots: the Innocent Man Wrongly Accused. It's there in
Saboteur and in Frenzy; it's at the heart of one his best-loved
classics North by Northwest, a movie I've always been able to appreciate
much more than enjoy for exactly that reason. Thankfully (again, only as far as
I'm concerned), that particular plot doesn't appear in too many of the titles in
the Masterpiece Collection, which offers up a varied mix of suspense
(Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, The Man Who Knew Too Much),
psychological drama (Vertigo, Marnie), political intrigue
(Topaz, Torn Curtain), horror (Psycho, The Birds)
and even black comedy (The Trouble with Harry, Family Plot).
Though every movie feels like a Hitchcock movie -- there's no mistaking his
themes and style -- the offerings here are different enough from one another
that it's easy to plow through all 15 titles without a sense of redundancy.

The chronological structure of the box set makes another argument for
watching the whole thing in order, too, because it provides a real sense of just
where the director peaked -- you can pretty much tell just by reading through
the titles as listed. Hitchcock's streak from Rear Window through The
Birds (minus maybe his remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which is
good but not great, but including the underrated The Trouble With Harry)
is as good as any filmmaker has ever had. It's an even more impressive
accomplishment when you consider that Hitchcock was cranking movies out at the
rate of about one a year, creating movies that are unmistakably his despite not
writing any of the screenplays. Such is the strength of his directorial
voice.

For my money, Vertigo remains Hitchcock's best movie (which was
confirmed by Sight & Sound choosing it over Citizen Kane as
the best movie ever made in this year's critics' poll, depending on how much
faith you put in such things -- I'm mostly kidding when I say
"confirmed"), though obviously Psycho is a close, close second.
While there are going to be diehard fans of any of his movies (any movie period,
actually), I don't think Hitchcock is one of those directors where there are a
whole lot of entries in his filmography debated as his "best" -- the
discussion is basically reduced to a handful of titles (some of which, like
Vertigo, North by Northwest and Read Window, are included
here, and some of which, like Notorious, are not). But the Blu-ray
collection will hopefully allow audiences to fill in the gaps on a few titles
they may have missed, or rediscover some of the underrated titles in Hitchcock's
catalogue (like Frenzy and The Trouble with Harry) once deemed as
"lesser" efforts.

Most of the transfers in The Masterpiece Collection, all presented in
full 1080p HD, are excellent, looking better than they've ever looked on any
home video format. The black and white transfers on Shadow of a Doubt,
Saboteur and, of course, Psycho (which has been released on
Blu-ray before) are all striking in their contrast and clarity, retaining all of
their detail and rarely, if ever, succumbing to issues of crush or artifacting.
Other films, like Vertigo, Rear Window and The Trouble with
Harry, are just as striking in their vibrancy of color and cleanliness of
the image. The good transfers on the set (and the majority of them are very
good) rarely give away the age of the movies; Universal has done a terrific job
of restoring and cleaning them up. There are, however, a few disappointing
spots. Marnie suffers from a problematic grain structure, with grain
swirling the screen to a distracting degree in one shot and being all but
nonexistent in the next. Frenzy is a disappointment, too, but because it
goes too far in the other direction -- it has been too "cleaned
up," to the point where liberal doses of DNR has stripped the movie of a
lot of detail and leaves things looking unnatural and plastic. The biggest
bummer of the set, though, is Hitchcock's last movie, Family Plot, which
seems like it was thrown in as an afterthought or that the studio ran out of
time or patience to restore just one more movie. I've seen it compared to an
early DVD transfer, and that sounds about right -- colors are bad, detail has
been ruined by digital tinkering, black levels disappear from crush. Not only is
it one of the worse Blu-ray transfers I've come across, it's all the more
disappointing because it closes out a brilliant box set on such a down note.
Universal should have stuck the landing and they didn't.

None of the lossless audio tracks suffer from the same inconsistencies. The
majority of the movies feature DTS-HD mono tracks, which are faithful to the
source and do a good job of balancing the dialogue and memorable music without
any hiss or ever feeling tinny and hollow. Three of Hitchcock's best-known and
most popular movies, Vertigo, North by Northwest and
Psycho, receive surround sound mixes (though two of them, Psycho
and Vertigo, also contain their original mono mixes for purists), all of
which are effective and tastefully done. They're not bombastic or obnoxious, and
offer the opportunity for Bernard Hermmann's scores for all three to really
shine.

Many of the bonus features for each movie have been carried over from the
many previous DVD releases, with only a few titles receiving any new content.
Every disc contains a retrospective production featurette devoted to the movie
in question (running anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes), a collection of photos
ranging from storyboards to production stills to publicity galleries and at
least one trailer. The documentaries are almost always enjoyable and
informative, revealing the films to be richer and more complex than one or two
viewings might suggest; Hitchcock's technique is often so sly that it's nearly
invisible unless it's pointed out. Several of the "flagship" titles
get a more deluxe treatment. The bonus features on those discs are as
follows:

Rear Window: Commentary by author John Farwell, retrospective
featurette, a second featurette that looks back at Hitchcock's entire body of
work, a 30-minute interview with Hitchcock called "Masters of Cinema,"
excerpts from Hitchcock's legendary interviews with Francois Truffaut, an
interview with screenwriter John Michael Hayes, a piece on the director's use of
sound, a collection of production stills and trailers for the original release
and that re-release.

Vertigo: Commentary by director William Friedkin, a 30-minute
retrospective featurette looking back at the movie's production and legacy, a
collection of featurettes covering Hitchcock's regular collaborators, more
interview excerpts from Hitchcock and Truffaut, a short "100 Years of
Universal" piece (presented in HD) focusing on Lew Wasserman's run at the
studio, a collection if pre-production drawings, an alternate ending and
trailers for both the original release and the restoration.

North by Northwest: Screenwriter Ernest Lehman's solid commentary
track has been ported over from the DVD release; an hour-long doc on Hitchcock's
directorial style, a making-of featurette and a retrospective featurette, a
90-minute documentary on star Cary Grant, originally produced for PBS, a
collection of stills and trailers, as well as the option of watch the film with
only Bernard Hermmann's score on the soundtrack.

Psycho: Commentary by Stephen Rebello, a 90-minute making-of
documentary, a featurette on the remix of the movie, featurettes on the shower
scene, the movie's original release and Hitchcock's legacy, storyboards for the
shower scene, interview excerpts from the Hitchcock/Truffaut sessions, a still
gallery consisting of publicity stills, lobby cards, posters and other ad
materials.

The Birds: An 80-minute "making-of" documentary, a
featurette on the movie's legacy as a horror film, a deleted scene the original
ending, Tippi Hedren's original screen test, more excerpts from the
Hitchcock/Truffaut interviews, a collection of storyboards and production
stills, a featurette on the restoration of Universal's classics catalogue (the
same one that appears on many of the studio's 2012 releases), a featurette on
the studio backlot, two vintage newsreels promoting the movie's original release
and the theatrical trailer.

Closing Statement

In a year that has seen some incredible Blu-ray box sets -- Indiana Jones:
The Complete Collection, Universal 100th Anniversary Collection,
Universal Classic Monsters: The Essential Collection -- the
Masterpiece Collection might just be the best one of them all. To have 15
films from one of the greatest (if not the greatest) directors of all
time collected on Blu-ray -- many for the first time on the format -- plus hours
of bonus content to boot is like a gift. It's film history, film school and
endless entertainment all in one box. This is one of the must-own Blu-ray
releases of the year.